


mute

by qmisato



Category: Neon Genesis Evangelion
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 18:00:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,980
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23101339
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/qmisato/pseuds/qmisato
Summary: Years after Second Impact, therapists try to draw words out of Misato.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 40





	mute

**Author's Note:**

  * For [unhedged](https://archiveofourown.org/users/unhedged/gifts).



**Remember everything and you remember nothing.**

—Amit Majmudar, Control+Alt+Delete Ghazal

  
  


They weren’t therapists. They were a macabre fusion between child speech pathologists, scholastic linguists, and psychoanalysts, all schooled in the arts of psychotherapy, authorities of Heisaku Kosawa and Sándor Ferenczi and Robert Langs. They hailed from the post-Freudian Japan Psychoanalytic Society at the behest of a scientific pressure group—a lobby, of sorts, all friends and colleagues of Dr. Katsuragi. After all, she was the only survivor of the Second Impact, but more importantly, Dr. Katsuragi’s only daughter, his future legacy. This was the least they could do. This is was what Dr. Katsuragi would have wanted. 

The Not-Therapists called themselves therapists, though, and she was instructed to refer—and think—of them as such. They visit her on Wednesdays and Fridays, where the four of them would cram into a small white Kei Jidosha, like clowns squeezing into a clown car, and drive two hours to the secluded psychiatric facility where she was held. The brunt of their time they spent dissecting their 2-hour long conversations with her. After all, if she never spoke again, she would be the next poster child for psychogenic mutism, and the four analysts who worked tirelessly on her case — Dr. Nomura, Dr. Uehara, Dr. Arata, and Dr. Ise — would be recorded in the annals of linguistics and abnormal child psychology. One might say they were incentivized for failure, to do as poorly as possible within accepted standards of professional conduct. 

Her meetings with them were broken up into four 30-minute sessions, each featuring a different pair of two therapi—no, scientists. As they collectively represented the new frontier of contemporary psychoanalysis, their therapeutic methods were unpredictable by design. Every day they break ground on a different method, conversation, or program. Gone were the clinical days of detached therapists and controlled, formulaic treatments. Dr. Katsuragi’s daughter was a unique case unlike anything they’ve ever seen before. She deserved the very best the disipline could offer.

At least, that was the thought.

“Good morning,” At 9:00AM sharp, Dr. Uehara and Dr. Ise arrive, dressed to the nines in crisp white lab coats with the ballpens neatly arranged in their pockets. Misato watches them enter one after another from her chair, her hands strewn in her lap, her blinks unwitting. Misato wonders if they think she blinked at them in response. That her blink means “Good morning to you, too”. The compliant girl, blinking in lieu of speaking, because it would be rude to ignore their greeting. But that’s not true. She just blinks.

It would be so easy, Misato thinks, for them to shed their lab coats and hang them on the door hanger. But their coats stay on. 

Dr. Ise is the only woman on the team. She is an exceedingly waspy lady with a ruler silhouette and a deep, submarine voice. Dr. Ise is also new — a replacement for the previous man on the team who'd been swapped out for mysterious reasons one month into her treatment. Misato hated that. Dr. Ise unimpressed her. She was dull. She looked simultaneously hungry and perpetually without appetite. She looked simultaneously like an adult who had never gone through puberty. She looked sick. 

“You look very healthy,” Dr. Ise offers, knowing she wouldn’t get a response back. Without looking to see if Misato blinked, Dr. Ise flips through her clipboard to read the update on Misato’s height, weight, and basic metabolic panel. Misato sees “ADD-ON TEST REQUEST (SPECIMEN IN LAB)” head a page that Dr. Ise robotically flips over. Dr. Uehara adjusts the collar of his pressed down shirt.

“You’ve gained three pounds,” Dr. Ise says.

“Is that so? I hope you’ve been eating well.” Dr. Uehara responds, normally the one to lead the discussion where Dr. Ise is taciturn. They have never once asked her a question about that day. They have never probed that part of her with no intelligible thoughts and not even a word to signify itself—those sensations beyond thought.

“The chefs tell me that your favorite food is skewered chicken. I guess that’s so...”

That is a blatant lie. The chefs have never cooked for her skewered chicken. She’s never had skewered chicken here. The only food to eat at this facility is fish with steamed rice, bean natto with steamed rice, and soba noodles, rotating in that order. She’s never had skewered chicken. She can’t even remember what skewered chicken tastes like.

Misato panics, because, why would they lie or be lied to? She cranes her neck to the left, as if to shake her head “no”, but stops short of completing the motion. But it’s too late. They derive meaning from her strangled resistance because that’s their job.

“No?” Dr. Uehara leans in with his elbows on his knees, eyes glinting with opportunity. Misato briefly glances at his knuckles. He wears a platinum wedding ring on the third finger of his left hand. Misato imagines him going home to his wife and talking about the mute girl who almost spoke—almost—today. “You changed your mind about chicken?”

Misato realizes that her body is tense with stifled motion, her neck still craned and her vein jumping in protest. She settles back into resting position like an animatronic who has been programmed into default mode. Dr. Ise stares wide-eyed, always the one to relish in a moment of Almosts that never comes to fruition. It’s too good—they’re eating her failures up, first with their eyes, then with their pens. 

“Misato,” Dr. Ise’s baritone voice cuts through the frustration of this moment, having deduced something satisfactory from the reaction. What just transpired will likely become the topic of a 3-page case study in a larger paper about how trauma irrecoverably perils child speech. It’s award-winning stuff. “We have something for you.”

Dr. Uehara stands up in a single swift motion. Suddenly and without further ceremony, they are rolling in an old TV monitor cart into the room, retro 90s wires trailing behind like a dead tail. This is new. She'd never watched TV during her therapeutic sessions. These sessions have always been one-sided conversations and spasmodic attempts at small talk. Besides, they are almost out of time. Misato glances at the clock. 17 minutes left. Dr. Ise notices her glance and intercepts with a clarifying word.

“Don’t worry,” she says. “This will be short.”

They keep the lights on—her therapists labor to avoid anything that might trigger a post-traumatic reaction—and insert a VHS tape into the gaping rectangle hole in the TV.

The TV monitor lurches to life with a static effect as Dr. Ise and Dr. Uehara step behind the TV, faces obscured. The tape begins with the leisurely voice of a male narrating the televised video: a father seated with his young daughter on a tatami, eating dinner. The voice says:

> TODAY’S CHILDREN WILL BE TOMORROW’S CITIZEN’S OF THE WORLD.
> 
> WHAT BETTER TO EXPAND A BUDDING WORLD’S CITIZEN’S HORIZONS THAN AFRICA, THE CRADLE OF THE HUMAN RACE?
> 
> FREELANCE WRITING IS NOT THE STABLEST OF LIVELIHOODS, 
> 
> BUT OTA-SAN MANAGED TO ACCUMULATE THE NECESSARY FUNDS 
> 
> ON HIS DAUGHTER’S 10th BIRTHDAY.
> 
> “You and I are going to Africa.” says ‘Ota-san’, the father on the screen, turning to look at his daughter for the first time. 
> 
> “What?” says the girl.
> 
> “It’s been my dream for years,” says the father.
> 
> The camera pans to a clip of a safari Jeep careening down mounds of sand, its passengers concealed. The narrator continues apace:
> 
> AND SO THERE THEY WERE, AMONG THE CHEETAHS AND THE GAZELLES AND THE MASAI TRIBESPEOPLE OF KENYA —
> 
> A LAND UNCHANGED THROUGH TENS OF THOUSANDS OF YEARS!

Misato, who had been wordlessly watching the screen, breathes noisily through her nose.

> IT WAS ONLY NINE DAYS, BUT ADVENTURE MAKES NONSENSE OF CHRONOLOGICAL TIME.
> 
> OTA-SAN RECALLS HIS LIFE OF PRE-ADVENTURE AS THOUGH 
> 
> IT BELONGED TO ANOTHER MAN.
> 
> “It must have been hard on her,” the program cuts to a clip of the father speaking into the camera, sand dunes behind him, wearing goofy sunglasses that do well to conceal the expression behind his eyes. Forget Ota-san, he is only a man anonymous with skin and teeth bared witlessly into a crazed, adrenaline-fueled grin. 
> 
> “But I’m repaying her now.”

“ **I hate this guy**.”

Katsuragi Misato’s voice cuts through the listlessly foolish spirit of the video, and behind the TV monitor cart, Dr. Uehara and Dr. Ise’s arms and knees jerk in surprise. Misato speaks nonchalantly, as though she were a movie critic trashing a predictable plot twist, but two things are for certain — one, her voice sounds different than she’d last heard it. Aged. Older. Worse for the wear. 

Two, it was either speak now, or burst into tears.

Speak now, or cry.

Speak now. That was her choice. 

“What?” Dr. Uehara exclaims, sounding more cartoonish than the people on TV.

“I’m having soooo much fun!” the girl squeals from the TV, arms raised in the air as her safari Jeep tumbles dangerously down a sand dune. 

“Thank you, daddy!”

Katsuragi Misato is discharged two weeks later.

* * *

Katsuragi Misato is bored. 

Sure, she had a mountain of paperwork to plow through, but right now, she just couldn’t be bothered. Those bureaucrats were all the same, she thought, complaining about the waste, the spillage, the crushed cars, the razed shops, the city blight. It was blight they loathed, as though there was a queue of people with their pockets lined with money just waiting to move into the new luxury condominiums of Tokyo-3. Blight, or death. 

Misato clicks mindlessly on the whitespace on her computer screen. After a few unintelligent seconds, she pulls up a new tab and types “ise sakoto hakase” into the search bar.

Nothing. Nothing of note. Misato furrows her brows into a ‘V’, scrolling for any reference to the woman she once knew. She clarifies her search, typing “ise sakoto japan psychoanalytic society” into the search bar.

There, a meaningful result — an obituary, complete with a picture of the woman, hair awash in grey and eyes fenced in wrinkles. Misato winces in an automatic way. She looked even worse than she remembered her, but that was old age. At least she got old. That’s more than could be said for most.

She clicks on the obituary page and reads through the mortuary tribute:

> Ise Sakoto (1942-2013) The Japanese and international community of psychoanalysts mourns the passing of one of the most distinguished practitioners in their discipline. Ise was a Fellow of the Japan Psychoanalytic Society, Member of the International Psychoanalytical Association, and Honorary Member of the German Psychological Society.
> 
> Ise famously worked on world-renowned cases in child speech therapy. Her last contribution to the world of theoretical and clinical psychoanalysis was on the subject of what she described as the four key memories: terror, dread, rancor, and pain. 
> 
> Ise passed in Munich from a short illness at the age of 71. She is succeeded by her husband and 3 children.

“Three children?” Misato exclaims aloud to no one, enjoying the incredulity of her voice. “I could’ve sworn that woman was asexual.”

Misato retraces her way through the search results, marveling how fastidiously Dr. Ise had been scrubbed from the internet, save for this lonely tribute in her memoriam. The same held true for Dr. Uahara, Dr. Nomura, and Dr. Arata — there was nothing left to their trace. It was as if they’d existed only in her memory. 

All intentional, Misato figures. They couldn’t be known anymore. It was too dangerous. 

With a long protracted sigh, Misato X’s out of the screen and closes her laptop, seeking for the melodic noise as the laptop winds down. She huffs, notes the emptiness of her room. The glaring overhead lights. The silence. She could speak to no one and it would be okay.

“...I’m going to get skewered chicken.”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> for pan's birthday, inspired by her fic **salt water** and how succinctly she described the end to misato's psychogenic mutism. for your reading pleasure: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15211475


End file.
